But Android Karenina was gone.

In the bedchamber, Anna threw the lock and slumped into the armchair. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone to the moon, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends in Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, some secret she knew and yet did not know… she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” she cried, and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all.

“Yes, to die!… And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself, she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand.

She heard a pounding at the door, but, as though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn toward it. Let him knock, she thought, let him worry. Vividly she pictured from different sides his feelings after her death.

The knock was not from the door, however, but the windowpane. It shattered violently and an Honored Guest burst into the chamber and flew across the room toward her, shrieking horribly, its dozens of grimy yellow eyes flashing, its razor-sharp beak aimed like a dagger at her breast. Anna rolled from the armchair, scrabbled backward and threw her hands over her face, and now the beast was atop her, slashing at her with its three-fingered talons, jabbing at the flesh of her throat with its snaggled aculeus. She screamed Vronsky’s name, clawed back at the thing, her fingers scrabbling uselessly across the tough, crocodilian hide. A drip of the monster’s saliva landed on her clavicle and burned like boiling tea.

The alien screeched and jabbered. Why, Anna asked herself, why did she fight? A moment ago she had felt the desire to die; why not let this terrible eater of flesh consume her and be done with it? But even as her mind raced, her desperate fingers were seeking a vulnerability to exploit; she sought out the soft underside of the squamous beast, finding the belly meat and digging in her nails-the thing howled and pulled off, allowing room for Anna, bracing her heels in the wooden floor, to fling herself up and the alien off her.

The multitude of eyes blinked off-sync, and a hot stream of saliva flooded from its jagged snout and pooled on the floor, burning a smoking hole in the wood. In this moment’s respite, Anna jumped on the armchair like a timid woman in fear of a mouse, removed one of her heeled shoes to brandish as a weapon, and heard Vronsky call “Anna!” from the other side of the door, followed by the reverberant thud of his shoulder against the wood.

The creature was up and in motion, ropy talons entangling themselves around her torso, arms like knotted saplings, needled mouth driving up toward her neck. Anna screamed; there was nowhere to hide, no counter-attack to launch; her vision filled with the furious nictitation of the beast; on the street outside she heard a queer pulsing tikkatikkatikka; death had come for her, now, in the form of this space monster… Anna’s world went black… and snapped back to light, and to life, at the familiar, snapping sizzle of a hot-whip. She felt the grip of the alien slacken and release. The whip cracked again, and then again, and Anna opened her eyes to see the stinking corpse of the alien sliding slowly down her frame into a slack, sizzling heap at her feet. Anna, trembling, looked to Vronsky, who stood calmly in the doorway, his hot-whip already retracting into its hip-sheath.

“Thank you,” Anna said quietly. And then, unable to bear the sight, she rolled the noxious corpse across the room, kicked open the window, and pushed it out; turning her head away in disgust, she did not see the body fall, did not see the massive, faceless worm, large and long and gray-green, that caught the broken alien body on its segmented back and slithered quickly away down the Moscow street.

Vronsky went up to her, and, taking her by the hand, said softly: “Anna, we’ll go to the moon the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to everything.”

She did not speak.

“What is it?” he urged. “This…” He indicated the burst window, the steaming crater on the floorboards.

“No… no… you know,” she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst into tears.

“Cast me off!” she articulated between her sobs. “I’ll go away tomorrow… I’ll do more. What am I? An immoral woman! A stone round your neck. I don’t want to make you wretched, I don’t want to! I’ll set you free. You don’t love me; you have a role to play in the New Russia, and I have none! Go and play your role!”

Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.

“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. Anna’s despairing jealousy had changed to a despairing passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with kisses his head, his neck, his hands.

CHAPTER 13

FEELING THAT THE reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure, not taking the time to repair the wrecked bedchamber. Though it was not settled how long they would stay on the moon, or how they would be served, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily. She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.

Pyotr came in to ask Vronsky to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. Anna was curious, despite herself, regarding this clumsy technology that was supposedly to replace the simple elegance of monitor-to-monitor communication, but Vronsky jammed the paper hurriedly into a pocket, as if anxious to conceal something from her.

“By tomorrow, without fail, we shall launch for the moon.”

“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.

“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.

“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”

“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: he seems to have discovered a particular enjoyment of this new mode of communication. But why telegraph when nothing is settled?”

“Did he speak to Karenin?

“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read something very different from what Vronsky had told her. “He has power and inclination to destroy you both completely STOP Has not yet decided when or how but will destroy you STOP I sorry STOP I so sorry END.”

“I said yesterday that I was quite certain he would refuse our request for amnesty,” Anna said, flushing crimson. “So why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it?” she challenged him.